The Uncountable Cons of the War on Drugs

More and more Americans are beginning to question their government’s war on drugs. The younger generation is leading the discussion. The Texas Millenial Institute recently hosted a drug policy forum at Texas Christian University; my own campus political group at Texas A&M held a meeting on drug decriminalization; and this video criticizing the drug war recently went viral on social media. With public concern on the rise, it’s a perfect time to review some of the unintended consequences of modern drug prohibition. Let’s start with…

Gangs and cartels. Powerful criminal organizations aren’t inevitable components of human society. Banning things spawns them. When America criminalized alcohol in the 1920s, we got Al Capone and his gangsters; now we have liquor stores. Before cannabis was first regulated in the 1930s, we had peaceable farmers; now we have violent cartels. Gangs form to meet consumer demands that the legal market cannot. And since law enforcement institutions don’t protect suppliers of illegal goods from aggressors (and indeed become aggressors themselves), drug suppliers must protect their own property. Hence, they are necessarily violent. This certainly doesn’t help with…

Crime. Drug prohibition not only generates extensive crime and violence among supply-side institutions, but also pushes the average drug consumer towards lawlessness. Criminalization inflates the cost of users’ habits, reduces their legitimate opportunities for advancement, and introduces them to criminality by definition. And if they wind up in prison, they’ll receive master’s degrees in being bad—at your expense. Which takes us to…

Mass incarceration. You’ve seen the figures before: the US government holds about 2.2 million citizens in its prisons, more people than inhabit the Texas metropolises of Dallas or Houston. It’s insane. America’s pursuit of drug offenders vastly overburdens its criminal justice system, siphoning resources from dealing with crimes that directly harm unwilling people. Besides being unfair, dangerous, and life-destroying, incarceration might be the worst way to correct someone’s bad habits. It’s also very costly. Just like…

Corruption. Entire police departments have been caught laundering drug money. DEA agents are frequently discovered to be cooperating with criminal organizations. Our indispensable CIA has been exposed to be dealing in narcotics so many times throughout its hazy history as to render meaningless any distinction between its drug policies and its drug conspiracies. Also, do you think drug cartels buy officials only south of the border? I doubt it. Banning things has a toxic effect on the institutions we grant power over them. Speaking of toxic effects—what about…

More dangerous drugs. Criminalization drives people towards dangerous synthetic drugs like methamphetamine—or markers and glue—which are easier to produce or obtain without being caught. Additionally, since prohibiting substances makes handling them costlier and riskier in proportion to their volume, banned substances tend to become more potent. This potency effect explains why beer promptly gave way to hard liquor during alcohol prohibition; and why the concentration of psychoactive THC in marijuana has increased drastically in the past few decades. Also, because the illicit drug market is cloaked in secrecy, drug suppliers can get away with bulking or lacing their products with all sorts of nasty ingredients. Organizations operating under law have to be much more careful about harming people—unless we’re talking about the state itself, whose policy…

Prevents treatment. Sick people die because bureaucrats bar them from medicine. Cannabis, as one example, is especially valuable in curbing certain rare and dangerous conditions. Unfortunately, it’s often illegal. On a related note, average drug users, being made criminals, find it difficult to obtain help; and potential helpers have disincentives to provide it. It’s a shame, really. In fact, it’s…

Immoral. Is it morally justifiable to rob, kidnap, and cage people because they handle or consume certain substances arbitrarily banned by politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests? What if they’re consuming these substances to save their own lives? To have fun? Does it matter? I don’t think so. A plausible moral argument might be made for drug prohibition if it actually did benefit society in the long run; but as this list indicates, we cannot make such an assumption. Indeed, we see that most of the evils we associate with drugs actually result from criminalizing them.